A World War II veteran with a stentorian voice, a firm handshake and a head of thick white hair, Maltese has been answering questions about his time in Panama, where he served from 1942 to 1945. The questions are repetitive, nitpicky, seemingly never-ending.

Though he was far from active combat, his account is violent, horrific, and remarkably consistent. It is also, he insists – because the federal government is not yet convinced – true. His voice fills the home on Otis Road in North Brunswick where he has lived for decades.

"I'm not making this up!" he says, exasperated.

This is the life of frustration and anger for a man whose own government does not acknowledge his account of his service in World War II. For more than 60 years, Maltese has sought federal benefits, and official recognition, for a litany of injuries and illnesses he says he suffered in Panama, including post-traumatic stress disorder, a debilitating anxiety disorder that afflicts many veterans for years after they've returned home from war.

Maltese first applied for mental-health benefits in 1952. At the time, it was called a "nervous condition." In 2013, medical professionals call it PTSD. In those 61 years, our understanding about the ailment has made vast strides, as has our acceptance of its prevalence among people returning from war.

What hasn't changed is the U.S. Department of Veterans Affairs' stance on Frank Maltese: It has declined to offer him mental-health benefits, even as a succession of doctors has diagnosed him as virtually unemployable, unable to socialize, battered by the war. This only stokes his anger, his resentment, his despair.

"It's so tight on the inside," he said, pointing at his chest. "So angry. I've been angry for 68 years."

Maltese's case is one local example of a frequent complaint from VA critics: The Department of Veterans Affairs is an unresponsive, implacable bureaucracy that often fails in its duty to those who have answered a call of their own.

Undated photograph of Frank Maltese during World War II. Submitted photograph.

The VA refused to provide NJ.com with any information about Maltese's case. A spokesman for the agency said that it could discuss Maltese's case only if Maltese signed a privacy release waiver. That waiver was signed and sent to the VA – in May.

A week later, prompted by a reminder, a spokesman said the request would be "expedited."

Two months passed. After another prompting from NJ.com, in August, the VA spokesman that he was looking into the case. Since then, it's been radio silence. The VA stopped responding to emailed requests and phone calls over the past few days, weeks, even months. From Memorial Day to Veterans Day this year, the VA has said nothing about Frank Maltese's case, despite the privacy waiver that it requested.

In the meantime, more broadly, the VA continues to come under scrutiny. All the while, Maltese continues to fight, like he has since the day he headed to a New Brunswick post office in the winter of 1942.

In more than a dozen interviews, World War II historians, attorneys and mental health experts have said that Maltese's account is plausible and that, if true, it would satisfy the VA's requirements for PTSD benefits. But it is also difficult to confirm. If the VA thinks he is lying, it is not saying so, because for five and a half months, it hasn't said a thing.

SERVICE BEGINS

In January 1942, Frank P. Maltese, then 21 years old, went to the post office in New Brunswick to enlist. It was a month after Pearl Harbor. He didn't come home for good again until October 1945 – three years, nine months and five days older, and forever altered.

After training, Maltese was shipped off to Panama to serve in the Sixth Air Force of the Army Air Corps (the Air Force didn't exist as its own separate entity until after the war). The defense of Panama was an integral part of the war effort; if the Axis forces had managed to cut off the Panama Canal, the Allies would have had a much more difficult time mobilizing forces in the Pacific.

Maltese says that even far away from active theaters, he saw the brutal effects of war. He said he saw planes on their way back from battles in the Pacific trying to make emergency landings at the airfield where he was stationed. A few times, he saw them sputter across the sky and crash nearby.

Salvage crews had to scrap the planes of valuable materials, even before the remains of his dead comrades had been recovered, according to Maltese. This happened two or three times, Maltese said. Supplies, particularly in a backwater like Panama, were scarce, he said. The first time Maltese went into the cockpit and saw the corpses of the people he had just recently seen at meals in the mess hall, he threw up, he says. To this day, he says he can close his eyes and still see his dead comrades' body parts baked into the cockpit.

Undated photograph of Frank Maltese during World War II. Submitted photograph.

The planes were outfitted with Norden bombsights, a technological innovation that allowed American planes to drop munitions with unprecedented accuracy. Allies jealously guarded the new weaponry, especially early in the war, when things weren't going very well.

And Americans would have taken extraordinary steps to make sure that the Norden bombsight didn't fall into the wrong hands, said Gary Boyd, an Air Force historian at Randolph Air Force Base near San Antonio, Texas. Boyd said it's possible that salvage crews would have prioritized the recovery Norden bombsights from downed planes, as well as sensitive intelligence that had been gathered from German U-boats patrolling the area. (Boyd said he found it unlikely that crews would have salvaged materiel, besides bombsights and intelligence, before remains of crewmembers were recovered.)

The Air Force Historical Studies Office, an official historical research arm of the military, told NJ.com that 216 aircraft were involved in accidents or went missing in the Antilles Air Command during the war. It also provided a history of accidents in the Sixth Air Force, compiled by a historian at the Museum of Flight in Seattle. According to that history, several planes did crash at or near the airfields where Maltese was stationed, killing crewmembers. Many accounts in the history remain vague: Some incidents are marked, "Fate of crew unknown."

Maltese's account of the crashes never wavers. And he describes psychological scars consistent with PTSD. He says he still has unwanted, intrusive thoughts about the salvage missions. He still can't eat meat that is cooked medium-rare. He has a recurring nightmare where he's at his North Brunswick home, flying face-first down the dark cellar stairs, his arms outspread, screaming, unable to stop before a crash-landing.

Once, a few decades ago, when his children were young, suicidal thoughts drove him to the Donald Goodkind Bridge between New Brunswick and Edison. His car was parked on the side of the road. He was thinking about jumping off.

It happened again, within the past few years. "I looked out over the railing..." he said, trailing off. "That's not nice," he says when pressed about it.

He still recalls the vast blue ocean from the tail-gunner seat of an airplane, looking out for the wake of enemy subs. He never fired a shot at an enemy craft. He recalls a nighttime mission on a little island off Panama, where a Japanese plane was said to have crashed. But he was never shot at.

Indeed, Maltese never saw the enemy. He doesn't claim to have seen combat, at least not first-hand. But the VA doesn't require that a vet have been involved in combat for a PTSD diagnosis. The VA says that PTSD is caused by "seeing or experiencing an event that involves actual or threatened death or serious injury to which a person responds with intense fear, helplessness or horror."

Undated photograph of Frank Maltese with comrades during World War II.

Even putting aside Maltese's account of the gruesome salvage missions, veterans can get PTSD benefits if they were exposed to the fear of an enemy force – even if that fear was never realized.

"Why the VA is not seeing that as meeting criteria, I couldn't explain," Mike Petrokno, a professor at the Rutgers University Graduate School of Applied and Professional Psychology, said after hearing a précis of Maltese's case.

Petrokno has worked with many veterans who suffer from PTSD over the years. In broad terms, the cause of PTSD is experiencing or witnessing a life-threatening event, Petronko explains. Someone having a flashback will remember, as if it's happening all over again, the smell of decayed bodies, the taste of blood in his mouth, the heat of flames, pain shooting up his arm.

He worked with one World War II veteran who served with General George S. Patton in North Africa, and when asked when he came back from the war, he'd say: "Every moment of his life, every night, he was in Africa. That's trauma. That's what you carry with you."

SHELL SHOCKED

There's a scene in the classic war movie Patton, starring George C. Scott, in which the famous World War II general, visiting a soldier in a military hospital, finds out that the soldier has no signs of a physical injury but is suffering from traumatic stress incurred during the war – then commonly called shell shock.

Patton literally slaps the soldier across the face, tells him to snap out of it and accuses him of cowardice. (It's based on real events; Patton later apologized after a reprimand from General Dwight D. Eisenhower.)

That's how the VA treats many veterans who file for PTSD benefits, said David Anaise, an Arizona-based attorney, surgeon and war veteran of Israel's military.

"They kind of feel like Patton," Anaise said. "'This is BS. I went through combat, I never had this problem.'"

Anaise represents veterans in lawsuits against the VA.

"I think that we need to change the system," Anaise says. "I don't think it's right to make a World War II veteran wait for 60 years to get benefits."

Part of the problem, Anaise has discovered, is that documentary proof is often hard to come by, either because the documents didn't exist or because they got lost in the intervening years.

"People who work for the VA make it easy for themselves by saying, 'You prove it,'" Anaise said. "And I don't think you can prove it."

MALTESE'S FILES

Maltese, according to his own files, was denied PTSD benefits and other benefits for service-connected injuries, including malaria and a fungal infection, in 1952, in 1980, in 1982, in 2008, in 2010, and in 2011. (This is despite testimony from doctors each time that said he was under their care for a nervous condition or PTSD.)

In some of its denials, the VA has told him as recently as 2008 that he hadn't sufficiently proved that he even had PTSD.

Maltese re-opened the case in 2010, this time providing evidence from his private therapist, who avowed that Maltese has been diagnosed with PTSD.

The VA was satisfied with the diagnosis, but it denied him this time around because it claimed he hadn't proved that the service-related traumas that caused the PTSD – the plane crashes, the nighttime missions – had actually occurred.

So how does he prove it? It's not exactly straightforward. Many of Maltese's military records were lost in a fire at a National Archives building in Missouri in the 1970s. And some of the records that do exist, like the accident reports from the Sixth Air Force, are vexingly vague.

According to Maltese, the VA has asked for tail numbers of planes that he says he helped salvage.

"What 20-year-old would write that down?" Maltese says. "I didn't even know what a tail number was."

In addition, in July 2010, the VA greatly liberalized the burden of proof as it relates to PTSD claims caused by fear of enemy attack. The fear of enemy attack is certainly one part of Maltese's narrative – the transport ships that brought him to Panama were dropping depth charges along the Atlantic Ocean, he says. After the July 2010 regulation change, a non-combat veteran now only has to prove that the fear of enemy attack was consistent with the circumstances of his or her service.

Why the VA hasn't accepted his claims under the newly liberal evidentiary standard is unclear; the agency is still asking for corroboration after it went into effect, despite proclamations in 2010 that it was all but eliminating the requirement from many PTSD benefit claims.

The reasons for the many denials he's received are often vague, sometimes nonsensical, approaching the farcical. A line of one denial, from December 2010, reads, in its entirety: "Your claim was denied because August 28, 2008."

In May of 2012, Maltese went to Newark for a hearing by an appeals board in Washington, D.C., via an Internet video chatting program. Maltese says that at the end of the appeals hearing, the VA official said, from Washington: "He looks fine to me!"

WHY HE FIGHTS

Frank Maltese is one of nine children, and four of his brothers served in World War II. The family could well serve as a model for the belief among experts that every veteran will experience war in a different way. Each of his brothers survived the war, but showed differing signs of trauma, Maltese says.

Joseph Maltese is Frank's lone surviving brother. Joseph, 89, does not want to talk about the war. He was part of the U.S. force that gained a foothold on the European continent on the beaches of Normandy, in France. (The only thing Joseph Maltese says in a telephone interview from his home in Flemington about his service is that, if you go to Normandy today, you will see a lot of cemeteries.)

Joseph Maltese believes that Frank is a truthful person. And he sees clear signs of psychological distress that Frank brought back from the war.

They don't keep in regular contact, according to both men. But a few years ago, the family was celebrating the naming of a road in North Brunswick after the Maltese family. One person in the crowd stood out.

"Everyone's dressed in suits, and (Frank's) in a jumpsuit, as if he's ready to jump out of a goddamn airplane," Maltese says.

WHAT'S NEXT

When Frank Maltese meets visitors at his house, he is usually wearing his authentic World War II drab olive dress uniform, with his sergeant stripes and the bars denoting how long he served. It still fits.

And, after an hour of chatting, he might ask if he can get into something more comfortable. And when he comes back out, he will be sporting the replica blue jumpsuit, one of a few that he wears regularly. (I interviewed him three times and never saw him wearing anything but World War II regalia.)

Frank Maltese with his brother, Nick, during World War II. Submitted photograph.

It is clear that he is proud of his service, and he calls himself a patriot – when he's asked why he joined up in 1942, he looks quizzically and says, straining to contain his incredulity at the question: "We were under attack."

Since June 2010, he's received about $130 a month from the VA for tinnitus, or ringing in the ears. He says he never applied for tinnitus benefits, and considers it a token gesture meant to placate him.

He is considering filing a lawsuit. Right now, he is not entirely certain where his case stands. The answer seems to be: bureaucratic limbo. But there is hope of a resolution. Maltese just hopes it comes in time.

About a week after NJ.com first contacted the VA in Washington for comment about his case, a VA official called him, unprompted, he says, to schedule an appointment with one of the VA's staff doctors in East Orange.

According to VA paperwork provided by his daughter, Faith Maltese, the doctor diagnosed him with PTSD and concluded that it was service-related. Maltese says he was told he'd hear back in 30 days about benefits.

That was in June. Since then: radio silence.

In the past few years, he's taken up woodwork, to keep his mind off things, to keep the anger at bay. He retired about 10 years ago from the family steel business, N. Maltese and Sons.

He has a few of his finished wooden sculptures in the cellar – the U.S. Capitol, the Eiffel Tower, the Arc de Triomphe. He might soon take on a new project: the Brooklyn Bridge. There's no particular symbolism behind any of the pieces, he says with a shrug.

For now, he's in a holding pattern. He is 92 years old. He is angry. He is turning 93 in December. In 1945, 16 million American veterans came home from the war, the greatest generation. Today about a million of them are still alive. In an average day, according to VA statistics, 600 World War II veterans die.

This is what Maltese believes: The VA is dragging out the process as long as it can, because time is on its side. He believes the VA is waiting for him to die.